Upgrades to the WordPress Service Being Planned

The University’s WordPress blogging platform at https://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk, which was launched in 2009, has been a tremendous success in terms of engagement with several thousand blogs and websites created over the years. It is used extensively across the University to support learning and teaching, disseminate research, and as the online home for many academic and professional services departments and teams. Plans for updating the WordPress service are underway and one aspect of this is an upgrade to the original WordPress installation tentatively planned for late July 2018.

To minimise any disruption, we are aiming to identify blogs and sites hosted on the platform that are in active use so that we can prioritise these for testing following the upgrade. We will be contacting members of staff who are site administrators by email w/c 30 April.

We know that the platform is used widely by students for a variety of purposes, including course assessments. To avoid any risk of causing alarm or confusion, we will not be contacting students who are site administrators on the platform at this time, although we are planning to disseminate wider communications ahead of the upgrade.

If you are a course tutor or programme leader who uses the blog platform for student assessment and you do not receive an email by Friday 4 May, then please contact us via wordpress@lincoln.ac.uk explaining how you use the platform and including a link to at least one example site or blog.

Please rest assured that at this stage we are not planning to remove or delete any sites or blogs and that we will be doing everything we can to ensure that the upgrade has minimal impact on staff and students. We are also planning to run a test upgrade on a copy of the blog platform w/c 30 April. This will not affect the live platform or any of its content, but it will allow us to gauge how long the process is likely to take, potential downtime for the platform and any impact on existing content. We will then review plans for the live upgrade as necessary to further minimise impact.

If you want to get more involved with the University WordPress community or have any questions about the plans to update the platform, please get in touch with Ben Samuels, ICT Project Manager or Tom Wright, Director of Digital Student Life directly or via wordpress@lincoln.ac.uk.